Overview of how government leverages cloud computing solutions

Cloud means many things to many people, especially in government. It can be a confusing topic for government IT leaders, procurement people, and the vendors and integrators who are responding to government requirements. This article is the first in a series on how government is using the cloud today and some thoughts on how things might work better.

First, let’s quickly talk about what cloud is. Cloud computing is all about making IT better. The end game is to make IT invisible, like electricity. You don’t think about how power gets into your home so you can charge your phone. As a matter of fact, you probably don’t even worry about being home to charge your phone. The plug in your office or hotel room is guaranteed to work. Cloud computing works the same way. Cloud makes the multitude of components powering the services, apps and entertainment we depend on, work invisibly. Cloud is what’s behind the easy button. It’s software, hardware, and smart folks stitching things together.

Cloud computing changes how businesses see IT because now they don’t have to own and maintain all the moving parts. Organizations can now replace components like databases, servers, storage and lots of software tools with a black box. This is great because the care and feeding of the IT food chain gets exponentially harder as complexity increases and harder almost always means slower and more expensive. Cloud services are a no-brainer for most companies today just like they are for you and I. Would you ever consider running an email server in your basement to get your mother-in-law setup on email? Could you build and maintain a service like Dropbox in your basement (or in the lab at work) that let you store, access share documents with anyone, anywhere? Even if you could, should you?

The world of government IT is a little different though. Bureaucracy, regulation, funding, security requirements and many other issues conspire to make IT in government hard. Anything new needs more than a business case to be adopted. It must be tested, documented, added to the approved products list, and procured according to a very complex set of rules that were probably written before cloud even existed as a concept. Add on the reality that government agencies are often running critical IT services at disaster sites or in deserts, jungles, ships or aircraft, sometimes with unfriendly forces doing everything thing they can to hinder the mission. It’s a unique challenge, but one that can benefit from the simplicity and ubiquity cloud can bring to IT services if government can figure out how to safely and efficiently use cloud services.

In follow-on posts, I’ll discuss the types of cloud services the government is using and describe some of the delivery mechanisms for cloud.